Surprise, surprise. In a shocking turn of events today, the White House has again used energy companies as their boogey-man to raise taxes and shift blame on the sequester. I would say they dusted it off, but they drag out energy companies so often, this particular boogey-man doesn’t have time to gather dust.

Yet in using this tired line of attack again, they don’t offer any concept to how capital-intensive the energy production industry is – and what significant steps energy companies face in delivering resources to the market.

Respected accounts of how the sequester was conceived and implemented credit the President with the idea of across-the-board spending cuts, largely aimed at the defense sector. Now, as the Administration has finally caught up with the reality the NAM warned of for months - a crushing blow to the U.S. economy – they’re trying to play the blame game.

The “solution” the Administration has offered is predictable – more tax hikes, more picking winners and losers through punitive tax policies, and absolutely no effort to address the true drivers of our debt, runaway entitlement programs. Tax increases won’t do anything to protect the jobs of more than a million Americans – in fact, it will just put more in jeopardy.

The Administration says that the sequester is bad policy – we agree. What I can’t understand is why they would choose gasoline as their weapon of choice when fighting a fire. I’m sure that focus groups responded to the corporate jet and energy company attacks. But that doesn’t excuse substituting politics for sound policy.